Business — page 12
Hollywood quietly runs on AI as Netflix pays $587M for Affleck's startup
Netflix says 300 shows now use generative AI, and Ben Affleck's $587M exit signals Hollywood's tech shift is already here.
Runware ships Sonic Inference Pod, a modular AI data center in a box
The startup has 10 pods running across three continents and 160 power sites lined up, betting distributed compute beats hyperscaler megaprojects.
Ati Robotics bets on India assembly as FCC bans Chinese humanoids
The Bangalore-based startup already runs several hundred robots at 50-plus US customers, with one model at less than 5% Chinese parts.
EON raises $10.75M to link data centers with orbital laser network
Endeavor Optical Networks wants to replace undersea fiber with a 20-satellite laser mesh targeting 2.4 Tbps between continents.
Reddit moderators fight AI-driven spam as chatbots make the site search's top citation
Reddit was the most-cited domain by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Mode in May, drawing a wave of covert brand promotion.
Mistral eyes $23B valuation as US export limits push Europe to open-weight AI
Revenue up twentyfold, a fresh raise in the works, and a market shift toward open-weight models has repositioned the French lab.
Palantir posts $1.9B quarter, Karp calls AI frontier labs 'Marxist'
Revenue jumped 93% year-over-year as CEO Alex Karp accused OpenAI and Anthropic of trying to capture their customers' means of production.
OpenAI's first influencer luxury retreat draws backlash online
The company flew creators to upstate New York for beekeeping and ChatGPT Work tutorials. Commenters were less charmed.
DesignArena raises $7.9M to sell human taste to frontier AI labs
The crowdsourced design-ranking platform hit $60M ARR and 5.3M users by letting labs buy scalable human feedback for image and web outputs.
AWS partners with Superblocks to pull vibe coding inside private clouds
The multi-year deal embeds Superblocks in AWS customer accounts, routing data through Amazon Aurora and Bedrock rather than external providers.
ChatGPT captures 90% of Congress's AI spending
House offices spent $100,580 on ChatGPT across 798 transactions in the year ending March 31, with Claude a distant second at $13,160.
Fast food's AI drive-thru era arrives at 6% of US locations
Taco Bell has rolled out AI at 890 lanes, White Castle uses 'Julia' at 12% of stores, and McDonald's is back after selling McD Tech Labs to IBM.
June exits stealth with $20M from Marc Benioff's Time Ventures to fix AI deployment
Four ex-Salesforce founders raised pre-seed capital without a pitch deck to automate the messy work of getting enterprise agents to actually run.
Pippa pays artists $0.005 per image to license AI video generation
The May 2026 startup has 800 subscribers, four licensed artists, and a Spotify-style royalty pool — but still leans on scraped open models.
Sam Altman's ChatGPT parenting pitch draws sharper backlash than the post itself
The OpenAI CEO's suggestion to feed family calendars into ChatGPT Work was outperformed 13-to-1 by a four-word reply.
Reddit CEO questions Google AI Overviews as shares fall 20%
Steve Huffman told investors the search giant's AI summaries haven't delivered value comparable to traditional links, as Reddit weighs ending a $60M Google deal.
Apple's Tim Cook floats iCloud+ paywall for heavy Siri AI users
In his final earnings call, Cook signaled Siri AI upgrades will sit inside iCloud+ as Apple races to catch OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
Smallest.ai raises $13M to build small voice models that mimic human turn-taking
The India-founded startup is betting specialized voice models beat LLMs at real-time conversation, with RingCentral and Truecaller already on board.
Univé rolls out ChatGPT Enterprise across its workforce
The Dutch insurer leans on OpenAI's enterprise tier and employee-led experimentation to make AI a daily habit rather than a pilot.
Reddit revenue jumps 61% to $805M, but AI search rattles investors
Q2 beat Wall Street on the top and bottom line, yet the stock fell 10% after CEO Steve Huffman flagged 'choppy' search referrals.
Apple's Tim Cook hints at paid iCloud Plus tier for heavier AI usage
Cook told investors Apple will offer 'upgrade possibilities' on iCloud Plus as Siri AI arrives with iOS 27 this fall.
Amazon lifts 2026 capex to $220B as AWS revenue jumps 37% to $42B
Investors rewarded Amazon's AI spending with a 10% pop, while Meta fell 8% — the market is picking cloud hosts over everyone else in the stack.
Situational Awareness sells public book to Citadel, keeps $5B Anthropic stake
Leopold Aschenbrenner's AI hedge fund shed assets to Ken Griffin's Citadel after a rout in AI infrastructure stocks, but its private holdings remain intact.
Okta buys AI identity security startup Permiso for about $200M
The nearly all-cash deal values Permiso at more than double its April 2024 Series A mark and pushes Okta deeper into securing AI agents.
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